“ W E S T R I V E A N D W E D O ” : T H E CO U N T E R P U B L I C

S P H E R E W O R K O F A L P H A K A P PA A L P H A S O R O R I T Y

Deborah Elizabeth Whaley

Africana Studies Department, University of Arizona

in 1997, dolores tucker, the chair of the National Political Congress of BlackWomen, spearheaded the Black Women’s Sojourner Truth Monument Crusade.Four Black Greek-letter sororities, Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA), Delta Sigma Theta(DST), Zeta Phi Beta (ZPB), and Sigma Gamma Rho (SGR) supported her efforts.Tucker and her supporters intended to prevent the removal of a statue of whitefeminists in the United States Capitol basement to the Rotunda unless an image ofthe feminist, abolitionist, suffragist, and human rights advocate Sojourner Truthwas added to the structure. On April 22, 1997, congresswoman Cynthia McKinney,a Democrat from Georgia, introduced legislation to put the aim of the sororitywomen and other civil rights groups into action. The Federal government sug-gested a separate statue of Sojourner Truth, but black women activists refused tocompromise.1 Tucker remarked pointedly, “Black women are sick and tired of beingleft out of the history of this nation.” The Sojourner Truth Monument Crusadeis one recent example of the way the black American sorority acts to address theabsence of scholarly attention to, and public knowledge about, the participationof black American women in public life and politics.2 This study explores the historically black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha and itsefforts in the counterpublic sphere toward the transformation of the lives andconditions of people of African descent from the early twentieth century to thetwenty ﬁrst century. The focus here is on Alpha Kappa Alpha because its formationin 1908 makes it the oldest black, Greek-letter sorority, and its combined social and

political platforms created the foundation for the other three major black Greek- letter sororities that followed into activist work. While the sorority’s work would oscillate from benevolence and reform to radical political interventions, I argue that much of AKA’s political strategizing and activism is tantamount to tangible, counterpublic sphere work. While there is a large body of intellectual work on the conservative and radical components of counterpublics, here I draw from the Black Public Sphere Collective’s (BPSC) theorization of Black counterpublics to deﬁne AKA’s role in public life. BPSC is a critical mass of black intellectuals who write about and hold commitments to working toward the betterment of black people’s lives on a large scale and at the grassroots level. For this insurgent group of intel- lectuals, Black counterpublics entail “the critical practice and visionary politics, in which [black] intellectuals can join with the energies of the street, the school, the church, and the city to constitute and challenge the exclusionary violence of much public space in the United States.”3 AKA’s efforts in the Sojourner Truth Monument Crusade and its initiative in similar (as well as more radical) collective efforts for nearly a century illustrate how far the women’s activism ﬁts BPSC’s deﬁnition of counterpublic sphere work. Not much scholarly attention has been paid to the political work of Black sorori- ties. In part this is because of the invisibility of their long-term cultural, social, and political interventions, as well as their racial insularity. Stereotypes of Greek-letter organizations as elitist and immature, in addition to the discriminatory trappings of many black social organizations, such as those related to color and class, also overshadow the complexity and political importance of black sororities. 4 These problems notwithstanding, uncovering Alpha Kappa Alpha’s counterpublic sphere work enables the mapping of transformations in Black women’s histories and il- luminates the impact of race, gender, class, and sexuality on activism. AKA is worth scholarly and activist attention because current cultural and political trends in the United States demand an urgent exploration of the positive value and role of social-political spaces where transformative practices are pursued in black com- munities. Counterpublic sphere work perhaps has increased subversive possibilities to existing forms of race, gender, and sex domination in universities where the production and maintenance of ideologies take place, and in social formations that may appear insigniﬁcant on the surface. Black sororities are more than social organizations dabbling in benevolence and reform; they hold ethnic centers that draw in a signiﬁcant number of college-educated Black women in the name of col- lective support, educational excellence, and commitment to change in their local and global communities. The arguments and examples here expand upon and depart from the work of Paula Giddings on the black sorority Delta Sigma Theta, and Marjorie Parker’s andwhaley: the counterpublic sphere work of alpha kappa alpha sororit y 141

Susan L. Smith’s work on AKA, which point to activism in black women’s sororitiesfrom either a historical (Smith), and/or member-identiﬁed stance (Giddings andParker). As a cultural critic with no membership afﬁliation to the sorority, I histo-ricize and theorize AKA’s political participation and involvement in communitydevelopment, grappling also with how AKA sorority struggles with its own class biasand conservative cultural politics, and how these shortcomings collide with its coun-terpublic efforts—issues that are absent in existing literature on black sororities.5A comparison between AKA and other racial-ethnic women’s social and politicalorganizations is also presented to show that AKA, too, took on activist work out ofnecessity related to issues of subordination in society of sexualized, gender, ethnic,or racial minorities. Following cultural critics Robin Kelley and George Lipsitz,this study posits that no social-political organization involved in activist work isperfect and transformative in every single historical moment.6 However, the politi-cal reality does not mean that black sororities cannot provide insights for change.Rather than arguing that AKA is a counterpublic organization, I suggest that muchof its work in the black and dominant public sphere represents the interventions ofblack counterpublics. What follows is a brief comparative history of AKA’s histori-cal formation and its ideological stances vis-à-vis white and racial-ethnic women’sclubs, a discussion of the contradictions and merits of its reform and counterpublicsphere work, with some attention to the political prescriptions for this and similarorganizations that are concerned with addressing the life conditions of people ofAfrican descent in the twenty-ﬁrst century.

The cultural, social, political, and ideological environment of AKA’s formation

requires historical contextualization in order to present the multifaceted natureand contradictions of its counterpublic sphere work. Black sororities are sister or-ganizations to women’s clubs and other civil rights organizations of the nineteenthand twentieth centuries, when women’s clubs provided a gender-exclusive arenafor self-actualization through involvement in political and social reform. Thesegroups emerged at a critical historical moment when white women and womenof color began to organize for enfranchisement and create reform movements toaddress issues such as healthcare for poor and working class families, child welfare,temperance, and literacy. White and Protestant middle-class women, Catholic,Mormon, Jewish, black, Asian American, Chicana, and working class white womenall created religious, social, benevolent, and literary groups to prove that educationand/or political work was neither trivial nor impractical for women. Organizationssuch as the National Council for Jewish Women, the Mormon Cleophan Club of142 CONTOURS 3:2

Salt Lake City, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the National Associa- tion of Colored Women, and the Black Christian Women’s Association performed benevolent work within, and sometimes outside, their communities.7 White and black women’s clubs continue to receive the most scholarly recognition, but such groups are a cross-cultural phenomenon. Cultural critic Cynthia Orozco writes that since 1870, Chicanas have organized through their own women’s organizations. Sociedad Beneﬁciencia, organized in Texas in 1870 during the Mexican Revolution to supply relief to soldiers, Chicana clubs in Los Angeles, which emerged in the 1920s, and Chicana’s work with settle- ment houses and the YWCA at the turn of the twentieth century are all part of, but are often hidden from, history. Since the nineteenth century, Asian American women have formed alliances to resist the forces that excluded them from American citizenship, and they worked within domestic, professional, and working-class- based organizations to counter their exploitation in the labor market and their lack of access to American publics. Their organizations, from Chinese women’s immigrant groups and those related to professional nursing and physicians’ in- terests, to the more recent Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA), address their precarious position and experiences regarding barriers to U.S. citizenship and their exploitation in garment, domestic, and middle-class work environments. For some women’s political organizations, their activism upset the very idea of what citizenship meant, for sovereignty and cultural autonomy from mainstream society was vital for their continued existence. Adherents to Women of All Red Nations (WARN), an intertribal cluster of Indigenous Nations activist women, made goals of cultural and political sovereignty a primary concern from the 1970s to today.8 As ethnic-based women’s alliances emerged autonomously out of exclusion and urgency to help their communities, white working-class women’s clubs were also formed to resist white middle-class women’s settlement efforts that were sometimes patronizing and Anglocentric. White women’s working-class girls clubs, such as the Daughters of Labor, provided a space for women to speak out about their labor woes and exploitation in factory work. Their club doubled as an organizing body to disrupt and challenge their lives as workers, and as a social base for recreation.9 Many historians of women’s cultures argue that these groups represented the yearning for sisterhood with other women and the necessity to express their identities as women and as responsible citizens. Though sometimes political in their practices, women’s clubs facilitated social interaction and self-afﬁrmation between and for women. In- terwoven into clubwomen’s everyday lives were the threads of race, ethnicity, national belonging, and class. Clubs of women of color also shared and faced what cultural and feminist critic Chandra Talpade Mohanty calls “a common context of racial struggle,” which politicized their efforts based on gender, ethnic, and race identities.10whaley: the counterpublic sphere work of alpha kappa alpha sororit y 143

BLACK WOMEN’S CLUBS AND THE

P O L I T I C S O F R E S P E C TA B I L I T Y

Segregation policies and racism within white women’s social and political or-ganizations continued to encourage Black women and other women of color toform ethnically centered clubs that would serve their communities, interests, andneeds. Many black women held multiple memberships in benevolent, civil rights,women’s, and sororal organizations. Black activists Mary McLeod Bethune andMary Church Terrell of DST; Norma Boyd, Rosa Parks, and Coretta Scott King ofAKA; and Ida B. Wells, who started the Alpha Suffrage Club, belonged to sororaland civil rights organizations and used both for activist work. Ida B. Wells startedthe Ida B. Well’s Club in 1894. This organization sought to draw attention to thelynching of black women and men. Later, many black women’s clubs would emergeand they would try to change existing negative perceptions of black womanhoodheld by the dominant society. The sexual image of black women in the whitepopular imagination, for example, was that of culturally, socially, and morallydepraved persons. In response, black clubwomen felt a pressing need to defendand reﬁne their womanhood. Similar to the aims of the ideologies of RepublicanMotherhood and the cult of true womanhood espoused by white women’s clubs,those of black women’s clubs focused on upholding Christian values, becom-ing productive citizens, and cultivating and raising families with similar values.11Ultimately, these women began to cultivate and embrace what many historianswould call the politics of respectability.12 Although white women’s social, political, and literary clubs and white reformersalso subscribed to the politics of respectability, for black Americans—especially theblack intelligentsia—these ideas had particular sexual, ethnic, and political mean-ings, as well as social and cultural consequences. The racial caste system at this timeled black Americans to desire to be seen as respectable. They used moral strategiesto combat racial attitudes about their communities and about blackness. HistorianStephanie Shaw observes that many black Americans, particularly of the middleclasses, “hoped extremely upright behavior would ward off dangerous attentionand counteract the negative stereotypes of African Americans that were commonthroughout white America.”13 Cultural critic and labor historian David Roedigerargues that white Americans still conﬂate blackness and hypersexuality, which inthe past cost many black American women and men their lives through rape andlynching.14 For black American women in particular, the rhetoric of noble woman-hood and the insistence upon respectable practices were intended to discouragesexual assault by white and black men. The rhetoric of respectability that blackAmerican women and men espoused, however, had intra-ethnic consequences.144 CONTOURS 3:2

Historian and cultural critic Kevin Gaines argues that many early twentieth- century black activists and intellectuals used the rhetoric of respectability, which contradicted and ignored the complexity of black life and often circumvented class struggle.15 Class, the historical phenomenon constituted in and through social rela- tions that “happens . . . as a result of common experiences, inherited, and shared,” does not wholly reﬂect the black middle class at the turn of the century.16 There was no uniﬁed thought for those involved in race work; some were sensitive to class, and others, in their pursuit to uplift and reform, publicly viliﬁed poorer black Americans. The perceived articulateness and education of the black intelligentsia, argues Gaines, made their political efforts more palatable to whites who controlled the political power structure, allowing these activists to do cultural work in the black and dominant public sphere. Claims of these early black activists to respectable practices set them apart and made class-disadvantaged black Americans appear “shiftless and lazy,” the catego- rization reserved for black Americans that such reformers were trying to disprove. The politics of respectability, intended as a subversive practice by race women and men, often had adverse ideological and material consequences for the black American community. Nevertheless, many of these men and women realized that disenfranchisement and racist attacks against one black person, regardless of class, kept all black Americans subordinate. They realized that a materially based middle- class standing would not act as a buffer against white racism. Though some of the twentieth-century activists belonged to the emerging Black Professional Managerial Class (BPMC) and earned middle- to upper middle-class wages, they knew they would never acquire, in addition to the material wealth enjoyed by their white counterparts in the Professional Managerial Class (PMC), the psychological “wages of whiteness.”17 Black women’s clubs and the black sorority of the BPMC became a dual sphere where private sphere interests intersected with public action. Women of many ethnic, class, and religious faiths in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries used the space of either a literary, religious, benevolent, or social club to transgress what early women’s history scholars call the private (conjugal home) and public (po- litical sphere of citizenry) spheres. The work of these organizations in the public sphere reﬂected their interest in transforming the racist and sexist society that kept their communities subordinate. Clearly distinguishable from white women’s clubs, which expressed concern about slavery, lynching, and racism, black women’s clubs made their crusades more personal and contingent on their survival with regard to gender and as a people. One may recall the suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony infamously adopting the slogan “woman ﬁrst, Negro last” after dropping the abolitionist crusade in favor of white female suffrage, as an examplewhaley: the counterpublic sphere work of alpha kappa alpha sororit y 145

of the contribution of white reformers to civil rights movements that was verydifferent from the commitment of black club women. Anne Ruggles Gere argues that the number of white upper-middle-class andworking-class women’s clubs dwindled drastically by the First World War and afterrealizing their dream of enfranchisement in 1921.18 However, voting rights for themasses of black men and women did not exist until the later twentieth century;before that, black women’s clubs and other ethnically centered political formationswere concerned with denied access to the vote. The work of white twentieth-centuryreformers sometimes generated suspicion and contempt from those they wishedto help. This was a stark contradiction to the mostly positive reception of the workof Black women’s clubs. In racial and ethnic communities, especially in immigrantand migrant urban areas, women’s clubs and benevolent groups operated as cul-tural and political foundations for their people. Cultural critic and activist AngelaDavis writes that what set white and black women’s clubs apart was black women’s“consciousness of the need to challenge racism in support of men and women ofAfrican descent whose lives had been transformed by their shared history of slav-ery, racism, sexual exploitation, and colonization.”19 Certainly, racism and sexismleft the work of black women’s clubs’ unﬁnished.

MORE THAN A SOCIAL GROUP AND

B E YO N D A R E F O R M M O V E M E N T

Compared with the work of Black women’s clubs, the work of the Black sororityprovides another example of how Black American women use social space to actpolitically in the public sphere. With roots in service-oriented social organizations,AKA sorority emerged in response to racism and sexism, and to demonstrate theintellectual capabilities of black women. In general, despite blacks’ academic re-cord, they did not have access to honorary Greek societies such as Phi Beta Kappa,founded at the College of William and Mary in 1776. Membership invitations fromwhite social sororities to black women were nonexistent because of U.S. segrega-tion policies. According to Benjamin Hooks, a former president of the NAACPand member of the Black fraternity Omega Psi Phi, “Before the days of racialintegration, white sororities and fraternities simply did not invite blacks. In 1942,I may as well have considered joining the Ku Klux Klan.”20 Because of the socialrelations that held black American women socially and politically subordinate, theblack sorority in general, and AKA in particular, emerged as a service organization.The black sorority therefore sought to assert black women’s educational excellencewhile creating social bonds, professional networks, and activist outlets. Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority was the idea of Howard University student Ethel146 CONTOURS 3:2

Hedgeman Lyle and eight other Howard women who shared her vision: Anna Easter Brown, Beulah Burke, Lillie Burke, Marjorie Hill, Margaret Flagg Holmes, Lavinia Norman, Lucy Slowe, and Marie Woolfolk-Taylor. Currently, the sorority has a membership of more than 140,000 in almost every part of the world, in- cluding the United States, the United Kingdom, the Bahamas, the Virgin Islands, Korea, and Germany. Hedgeman, born in St. Louis, Missouri, received an academic scholarship to attend Howard University in 1906. She was an active member of the Young Women’s Christian Association, the Christian Endeavor, and church choir, afﬁliations that shaped her community-based endeavors once she organized the so- rority. Since the idea to have a sorority at Howard was hers, the ﬁrst eight members wanted to elect Hedgeman as the chapter president of Alpha Kappa Alpha. Yet, as Hedgeman was still a sophomore, the women felt it was best to select Lucy Stowe, a senior, an innovator, and recorder of the organization’s internal structure. At the turn of the century, when black Greek-letter organizations (BGLOs) were forming, it was important for these men and women to prove their academic capabilities. BGLOs also considered it a priority to respond politically to the oppression of women and men of African descent and to create a network of friends during and after college21. Indeed, according to Paula Giddings, their “development was more than an imitation of White Greek letter groups that excluded them. Even the Greek appellations were, in part, a deﬁant response to the notion that ‘a Negro would never learn to parse a Greek verb or solve a problem in Euclid,’ as former vice president and states’ righter John C. Calhoun once opinioned.”22 AKA’s goals went beyond nebulous ideas of sisterhood and individual achieve- ment; these women sought to transform the society in which the lived. Incorporated in 1913, the sorority operates as a business organization with national headquarters (named Ivy Center) in Chicago, Illinois. Ivy Center acts as a structural base for the creation and deployment of AKA’s political work and ideology. The sorority’s incorporation resulted from the ﬁrst leadership rupture in AKA, reﬂecting the competitive tensions and internal struggles that social-political formations generally experience. In 1912, according to AKA historian Marjorie Parker, some members of the sorority wanted to vote for a new motto, name, symbol, and colors to represent the organization. One of the former presidents of AKA, Nellie Quander, resisted the proposed changes, as did other sorority members. Quander argued that the proposed changes would dishonor the founders of the sorority, and she immediately moved toward incorporation, a legal action that would ensure that the sorority’s foundation would remain intact, as the original founders had conceived.23 As a result, the women who suggested the changes left the organization and formed the second Black sorority at Howard University, Delta Sigma Theta. DST member Paula Giddings presents a different version of the discontent among the sororitywhaley: the counterpublic sphere work of alpha kappa alpha sororit y 147

women in 1912. Giddings, voicing the views of DST members, writes, “We wantedto be more than just a social group. We wanted to do more, when we graduated, forthe community in[to] which we were going . . . we wanted to change some ideas,we were more oriented to serve than to socialize.”24 Giddings implies that AKA’s scope was not political, and the discontented mem-bers left to form DST. Another version of the breakup, disseminated throughoutBGLO life, comes from sorority rumor and lore. Through interviews with AKAwomen conducted over several years, I learned that there were personal differ-ences between the women in1912. Many informants claimed that these differenceswere the result of competition over the male partners of the sorority members.Whether one prefers the folklore version, Alpha Kappa Alpha’s version, or DeltaSigma Theta’s version, AKA women were deﬁnitely involved in cultural work at thetime the rupture occurred in the organization. AKA members remained leaders inthe YWCA and NAACP organizations, and they continued to rally for civil rightsand suffrage after the organizational split. Nonetheless, the rupture between thesorority women should call into question romantic ideas of sisterhood on whichsororities and women’s clubs base their identity. AKA’s breakup shows that the process of sisterhood does not happen easily orin a vacuum, even for women who share a racial bond and, seemingly, a similarsocioeconomic class. Yet the beneﬁt of the split would emerge later through thechanging demographics of membership and the creation of other black Americansororities, such as DST, which would continue cultural and public work in their ownway and based on their own vision. The incorporation of AKA allowed the sororityto become national, spreading to the Midwest and beyond. Soon after incorpora-tion, several chapters emerged: Beta Chapter in Chicago, Illinois; Gamma Chapterin Urbana, Illinois; Delta Chapter in Lawrence, Kansas; Zeta Chapter in Wilber-force, Ohio; and Eta Chapter in Cleveland, Ohio. The move to spread throughoutthe Midwest at predominantly white colleges, and later beyond the United States,changed the organization from one with women of similar socioeconomic back-grounds and experiences to a more diversiﬁed group of women who were beyondtheir college years and acculturated within different regional environments.

I N T E G R AT I N G T H E O R Y W I T H P R A C T I C E

As with many social, cultural, and political movements, the recognition of trans-formation occurs when it penetrates the larger social relations. That is to say, socialand political change is most recognizable when it becomes visible by coalescingwith public life and politics. Jürgen Habermas argues that in the nineteenth century,participation in the public sphere allowed Anglo-American male bourgeois society148 CONTOURS 3:2

to evaluate and resist social and political life through the dissemination of discourses and by gaining access to speciﬁc social apparatuses (media, meetinghouses, etc.) to deploy their political ideas.25 Habermas’s work presents a critical framework for viewing political participation in public life. However, feminist scholarship has revamped Habermas’s explication of public life and politics by showing how an extension of his theory may beneﬁt the study of more organizations and historical moments. Nancy Fraser, for example, extends Habermas’s argument by describing the ways historically marginalized groups gain access to the public sphere and realize social and political transformation through what she terms counterpublics, “discur- sive arenas” where historically marginalized groups “present counter discourses of their identities, interests, and lives”; they act as competing publics to the dominant society and emerge as a response to particular social conditions at speciﬁc historical moments. 26 Counterpublic formation draws on cultural workers, often uses the apparatus of the media, and mobilizes around a speciﬁc issue or agenda. Houston Baker, Mary P. Ryan, and Ellen Messer-Davidow cite movements in which counterpublic groups conceptualized new social relations and disseminated their thinking through various media apparatuses to achieve transformation. Black male activists and orators transformed the American public sphere, argues Baker, by working to change the existing American arrangements in the 1960s for the masses of Black Americans. Ryan outlines how white women activists in the nineteenth century participated effectively in public politics despite patriarchal constraints. Messer-Davidow reveals the political right’s success in maneuvering within the public sphere to make their conservative ideas more popular to a substantial portion of society, and she argues that leftist groups would beneﬁt from similar organiza- tion.27 Theorists generally provide examples of counterpublics and help identify the various ways groups may access public spaces for insurgent and conservative political ends. AKA’s various forms of public sphere work have relevance beyond the historical references of Habermas, Baker, Ryan, or Fraser’s carefully constructed theoretical rearticulation of Habermasian concepts. Recall that black counterpublics engage in practices and politics where black intel- lectuals, in coalition with foundational black organizations in urban communities, including schools, churches, black businesses, and social organizations, challenge and work to change conditions of oppression and exclusion that black Americans face in the United States. AKA continues to accomplish counterpublic work for black people living throughout the African diaspora, serving as a revealing example of counterpublic formation and work in the use of direct action and counter-dis- courses, and in proposing antiracist legislation and encouraging higher education for black women and men. Unlike their white sorority counterparts who engaged in benevolent work, AKA pursued an agenda that was far-reaching and sociallywhaley: the counterpublic sphere work of alpha kappa alpha sororit y 149

responsible because of the racial injustices that black women faced in the publicsphere.28 Whereas the mission statement of the ﬁrst white sorority (Kappa AlphaTheta, formed in 1870) vows to create and promote sisterhood, AKA’s counterpublicwork would move beyond creating sisterhood in a gender and race-biased institution(i.e., the college/university).29 AKA’s organizational mandate aims “to cultivate andencourage high scholastic and ethical standards, to promote unity and friendshipamong college women, to study and help alleviate problems concerning girls andwomen, and to be of service to all [hu]mankind.” Like their sisters in the blackwomen’s club movement and benevolent societies, the African American sororityresponded to the speciﬁc social inequities between the races. Exploring AKA as aneffective counterpublic lays the groundwork to understand how social-political orga-nizations may sustain activism over an extended period. A systematic explanation ofits counterpublic sphere work in the twentieth and twenty-ﬁrst centuries illuminatesthe transformation of its objectives of benevolence and reform to calculated politicalinterventions that brought about signiﬁcant change.

T H E P O L I T I C I Z AT I O N O F A CO L L E G E S O R O R I T Y

AKA’s counterpublic work has consistently been in alignment with the BPSC’sgoal to increase race consciousness and ﬁght discrimination experienced by blackwomen and men. During the period 1908–1913, AKA’s primary agenda consisted ofmaintaining educational excellence through example; supporting national suffrage,the YWCA, and civil rights; and engaging in cultural practices through same-raceand social interaction. The women in Alpha Kappa Alpha observed clear goals fortheir communities. Their early counterpublic work began with conducting demo-graphic studies to determine the needs of black communities in their immediateenvironment. National headquarters encouraged each sorority chapter to perform“at least one piece of Christian, social or civic service for its community.”30 Thewomen thus became strongly motivated politically. To borrow from Frantz Fanonwriting on insurgent intellectual practices in general, AKA women began “to orga-nize coherent action, to communicate among groups, to formulate political theoryand policy, to write and teach and . . . perform and invent,” as a way to immersethemselves “body and soul, into the national struggle.”31 Among the chief goals of AKA were programs that would improve the cultural,economic, social, and educational standards of black women and men. Programsadopted by the various sorority chapters ranged from helping communities attaincivil rights (direct activism) to access to adequate health care (reform work). As thesorority spread to other university campuses, so too did graduate chapters emergewithin black communities, allowing alumnae members to continue sorority afﬁlia-150 CONTOURS 3:2

tion, and social and political interaction in the name of the organization. Graduate chapters inducted women who may not have had the opportunity to attend a college or university but who were nevertheless interested in being involved in community action. The growth in membership of AKA within and outside the United States created a demographic diversiﬁcation that was not present in its earlier years. While undergraduate chapters continue to initiate women who are matriculated in four- year colleges and universities and have a “B” academic average, graduate chapters select women who are already involved in community service and politics, and who desire to create social bonds with other black women outside of the university setting. Many of the chapters formed outside the United States were composed of existing members who relocated for military reasons or for studies abroad. Other women who were not initially members of AKA created chapters abroad because of the inﬂuence of AKA’s social and political reputation. AKA communicated with the sorority sisters through its national magazine, The Ivy Leaf, about their experiences while attending universities abroad, while in the armed services, and while doing activist work in such countries as Germany, Japan, and England.32 By the mid- twentieth century, sorority members did not resemble the elite black intelligentsia of yesteryear, nor were they only the product of family legacies at historically black colleges such as Howard. Instead, some were the ﬁrst in their family to afﬁliate with a black Greek-letter organization and to attain a college education. During 1913–1920, AKA women were involved in national suffrage and reform movements. In 1913, AKA sponsored a lecture by its ﬁrst white and honorary mem- ber, Jane Addams, at the University of Chicago. In the lecture, Addams stressed the beneﬁts of social and community work, and drew attention to the courses in social work she developed at the University of Chicago.33 She worked closely with black clubwomen and Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority in Chicago to improve life for urban black Americans, and she included black Americans at her settlement houses in signiﬁcant numbers.34 When Jane Addams died, an editorial in AKA’s magazine proclaimed that, through her work, one might see how “ideals are colorless.”35 She was not the last white woman to be made an honorary member. In 1949, AKA invited and inducted activist and former ﬁrst lady of the United States Eleanor Roosevelt. In 1921, AKA’s national headquarters required every chapter to set aside a week in January to commemorate the founding of the sorority and to develop activities that promoted “Negro history, literature, music, and art in order to promote an increased ‘race consciousness’ among Negroes.”36 The Ivy Leaf published members’ poetry, short stories, and artwork, as well as reprinted material that promoted the arts. AKA women participated in the Traveler’s Aid Society, which helped blackwhaley: the counterpublic sphere work of alpha kappa alpha sororit y 151

Americans who migrated to the North from the South to adjust to their new en-vironment. Ida Jackson created Alpha Kappa Alpha’s most recognized project, theMississippi Health Program, in 1934. Jackson, who had already organized sororitymembers to train black American teachers in their “Rural Negro Teachers Pro-gram”—a program wherein AKA women spent their summers training Southernblack women to acquire state accreditation—began a similar uplift program thatwould concentrate on providing healthcare to rural African Americans in Missis-sippi.37 Writing about the health project, Jackson noted that AKA women “had aduty to change things, or how can we face a new day?”38 The project merged medically trained AKA members, teachers, the United StatesPublic Health Service, and the Mississippi State–Holmes County Health Depart-ment to serve the African Americans in rural areas of Holmes County. Jackson chosethe rural communities because of the oppression and obstacles black Americansfaced in there, and because many New Deal relief policies did not adequately aidsouthern African American communities.39 She was concerned that the Federalgovernment did not provide medication and health services to black Americansin general; the Health Project, in part, became a response to this problem. AKAmember and medical doctor Dorothy Boulding Ferebee was director of the pro-gram. She was also director and founder of the Southeast Settlement House andwas Prenatal Clinician at a black hospital (the Freedman’s Hospital). Her work withthe Mississippi Health Project called upon other Alpha Kappa Alpha members toset up free health clinics, often mobile, in order to serve tenant farmers and theirfamilies on location. Jackson found that the white farmers feared and purposelytried to hinder their tenants from receiving medical care in Mississippi. Jackson’sson and biographer, drawing from his mother’s personal letters, wrote: “When theywent to Mississippi, they found that the plantation owners were not too keen ontheir labor force being exposed to this new relationship with the Northern NegroMedical People. Ida and her people were puzzled as to what was going on. . . . Aftera short while, she went to the plantation owners and it was at that time she realizedthey did not want their people to leave the land for fear they might not come home.Ida thought the best way to solve the problem would be to take the [medical] unitto the plantations.”40 For the Negro Teachers Program and the Mississippi Health Care project, IdaJackson insisted that the women should know about and have some experiencewith the South. They should also be able to understand Southern whites and blacks,have some educational training and versatility, and be located close to Lexington,Mississippi. AKA members internally funded the project. In the words of Ida Jack-son, “they had not asked for [monetary] outside help; they received funds fromtheir own membership.”41 Although a criterion for participating in their programs152 CONTOURS 3:2

in the South was knowledge of the region and its culture, this did not impede the appearance of obstacles. Dr. Ferebee explained that the health care initiatives taken up by the sorority in Mississippi were a corrective to some of the “rural South’s ignorance, crudeness, superstitions, hostility, and prejudice, among both Negroes and whites.”42 After the Mississippi Health Project attained its goals in the black Mississippian community, AKA made the decision to open a National Health Ofﬁce in New York City to continue to study and meet black healthcare needs. In addition to its healthcare programs, AKA made the end to lynching a pri- mary concern. The sorority began a national anti-lynching campaign, organized by AKA member Norma Boyd, who drafted the ﬁrst anti-lynching legislation pre- sented to the United States Congress. Boyd, who was involved in national suffrage campaigns in the 1920s, was the president of Alpha Kappa Alpha in 1941. She gave public lectures in the 1940s to educate and spread support for AKA’s anti-lynching campaign, and Boyd’s house served as the headquarters for the sorority’s crusade. Boyd’s chapter sold anti-lynching buttons, designed and distributed Christmas cards to raise money, printed newsletters about the anti-lynching bill’s progress, and remained an active lobbyist until 1948, well after the NAACP became involved in the movement for anti-lynching legislation.43 As AKA spread to college campuses and communities, each chapter adopted its own political agenda while upholding the national goals of the organization. The national goals helped to direct each chapter in alleviating national problems, and chapter-speciﬁc activism became a microcosmic reﬂection of the headquarters’ political priorities, although near mid-century AKA women’s practices continued to mirror the politics of respectability and the reform programs of earlier decades. Throughout the 1940s, AKA women sponsored programs such as “ﬁner woman- hood week” and created a reform project, Project Family,44 a coalition of AKA members and social workers who adopted twenty black families and administered not only adult education but also advice on birth control, budgeting, and career opportunities.45 Whether families construed AKA’s benevolent acts as helpful, as condescending interference in their lives, or as a mixture of both, remains a signiﬁ- cant question. Whatever the answer, it does seem that the somewhat patronizing settlement efforts of white reformers had an inﬂuence on AKA’s early contributions in black communities. Race and gender identiﬁcation did not erase class differences and social con- descension among black sorority women. Yet their common context of racial and gender struggle with those with whom they did work seems to have been a stronger bond than that experienced between their white sisters in social-political organiza- tions. Recall that white women’s working-class clubs were formed to oppose and alleviate exploitation in low-wage and frequently dangerous factory work.46 Manywhaley: the counterpublic sphere work of alpha kappa alpha sororit y 153

counterparts in “working class girls clubs,” as they referred to them, but despite therhetoric about sisterhood that such groups claimed to want to foster, class-basedproblems divided them in subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) ways. Middle-classwomen’s club members were willing to attend working class girls’ club meetings“and be pleasant and friendly,” as a Boston working-class girl’s club member wrotein 1891, but they did not treat the working-club women as equals and never invitedthem to their homes.47 If class continued to create divisions between women intheir activist efforts, these divisions worked differently for white and racial ethnicwomen’s clubs. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, AKA activism continued to focus on disen-franchised members of their communities and others, which led them to respondto the turmoil brought on by World War II and its discriminatory precedents. In1943 in St. Louis, Missouri, Norma Boyd, the Supreme Basileus of AKA, addressedher sorority sisters at a gathering of the women. She noted that the women mustrecognize that while “many individual sorors and chapters [were] already engagedin a variety of war-time services,” it was essential that “planning and organization[take place in their] period of emergency to be organized into a program of [na-tional] conscious effort.”48 Their conscious effort for citizenship, in what the AKAwomen felt was a moment of emergency, metamorphosed into AKA’s NationalNon-Partisan Council on Public Affairs. Established by Boyd in 1938, the National Non-Partisan Council on Public Af-fairs was composed of the sorority women and other civil rights organizationswho lobbied politicians. The council was part of a three-pronged program duringwartime that provided direct war services, supported victory among the allies, andgave attention to postwar reconstruction efforts. Through this lobbying body AKAsupported legislation on April 28, 1944, that helped integrate black women intothe navy. Soon after, AKA also commented on the discriminatory practices blackAmerican navy women experienced, ﬁnding it objectionable that black womenwere admitted to the Navy but were not considered for promotion to ofﬁcer, thatthey would only replace black men who could not work (thereby keeping stagnantthe numbers of black Americans serving), and that they were trained in segregatedschools. AKA disseminated news releases about the Navy women’s experience,marshaling public opinion on the matter. The sorority began an extensive inter-ventionist campaign in Congress and won the support of other national organi-zations. This counterpublic work resulted in the admittance of black women asofﬁcers and enlistees. The Council also introduced bills to Congress for Federalaid in education; to abort poll tax bills; to grant Federal funds to urban areas suchas the District of Columbia to ensure equal distribution covering black populated154 CONTOURS 3:2

areas; and to create employment opportunities for black veterans after the war. The National Non-Partisan Council’s lobbying and success represented core elements in the creation of a counterpublic, inasmuch as the sorority had accomplished by 1945:

Planning and sponsorship of conferences on race and gender issues

Dissemination of information about black disenfranchisement, including speech- es given on radio programs Cooperation with other women’s and civil rights organizations Funding of education and encouragement of black activity in public politics Use of civic, political, economic, and educational activities on behalf of racial integration in all phases of public life in America Planning and work that helped to improve life for black men and women in the armed forces Stimulation of thought and planning for the adequate solution of problems in peace and in anticipation of the postwar era49

Although Alpha Kappa Alpha women worked toward civil rights from their inception in 1908, the civil of unrest of the 1950s and 1960s brought new chal- lenges that inﬂuenced their approach to political activism. AKA sorority continued its activities in public demonstrations, as had been the case during the women’s suffrage efforts at the turn of the twentieth century. Along with other civil rights organizations, the sorority women participated in the march on Washington, and they boycotted segregation in public accommodations. In 1962, they opened the ﬁrst Job Corps Center for women in Cleveland, Ohio, which “assisted the government in preparing women and girls for economic independence” through vocational and job training.50 Their national headquarters’ commitment to civil rights inﬂuenced the efforts of individual chapters and their members. Alpha Kappa Alpha created a resolution on civil rights in 1969 for its chapters to adopt, which mirrored the insurgent as well as the conservative practices of the organization. The resolution is worth quoting in its entirety:

Alpha Kappa Alpha is militant and determined to improve and advance the con- ditions of all people. We have consecrated our ﬁrst effort toward the improvement of our own understanding of the possibilities for action in our local situations. We hold further that orderly protest is a part of the constitutional right of each individual, and we will participate in movements, which advance our goals, but we cannot condone, participate, or give support to violence. We believe that so- cial change is inevitable, yet we do not believe in change for the sake of change. We, therefore, will support clearly conceived and well-directed programs, which promote human dignity. Alpha Kappa Alpha pledges to share her resources of 51 time, skills, and ﬁnances to advance these goals for all people.whaley: the counterpublic sphere work of alpha kappa alpha sororit y 155

The sorority’s resolution slides back toward the politics of respectability and con-servative visions of change, despite rhetorical commitments to militancy. Whenthe women write, “we believe that social change is inevitable, yet we do not believein change for the sake of change,” they do little more than call for well-plannedprograms. “By any means necessary,” the often-quoted motto of Malcolm X, wasfar from the AKA’s agenda. Still, their programmatic planning, conceptions ofredistributing power, and opening up access to public life for black Americansmaterialized in ﬁnancial forms. During 1961–1962, the sorority promoted a nationalfund-raiser for college students who participated in sit-in activities in North Caro-lina, and it paid the college tuition for the ﬁrst black women who desegregated theUniversity of Georgia.52 The late 1960s transformed the sorority nationally. Their public sphere work,already signiﬁcant in its political programs and strategies, sharpened their focuson conventional civil rights ventures. As the 1960s came to an end, a writer in theIvy Leaf noted that “[t]he important thing to do is to take a stand and to not allowMartin Luther King, Jr., to have lived and died in vain. We must call the nation’sattention to the fact that Dr. King lived for all people and that something is requiredof us rather than eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth of justice.”53 In 1976, a nationalmandate from AKA headquarters urged the sorority women to involve themselveslocally in the ﬁght for human rights, ﬁrst-class citizenship for black Americans,and women’s rights.54 By the mid-1970s, the sorority’s political programs remainedconsistent, and their Cleveland Job Corps center became a core site of their work.From the time of the center’s opening in the 1960s until the mid-1980s, more thannineteen thousand students received job training and education that resulted in a95 percent long-term job placement.55 Perhaps one of the sorority’s most unacknowledged efforts was a lobbying andletter-writing campaign, reminiscent of its earlier years with the National Councilon Partisan Affairs, which led to the nationally recognized Martin Luther Kingholiday. In 1983, Alpha Kappa Alpha, in coalition with other BGLOs and civil rightsorganizations, initiated a campaign that generated more than a half million lettersthat were sent to congressional ofﬁces in Washington, D.C., along with petitionscarrying 4.5 million signatures. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed House BillHR 3706, which AKA member Katie Hall introduced to Congress, that would makeMartin Luther King’s birthday a holiday.56 In 1964, the sorority awarded MartinLuther King a plaque acknowledging his efforts in human rights, and the MLKHoliday campaign more than twenty years later shows linkages between past andpresent activism and civil rights concerns. In the winter of 1986, AKA focused on service with a global perspective. SixtyAKA members of the Xi Omega Chapter demonstrated on Massachusetts Avenue156 CONTOURS 3:2

in Washington, D.C., along with the organization Transafrica, against apartheid. Xi

Omega’s Genelle Fry, Phyllis Young, and Lela Moore were arrested in D.C. during the protest. AKA’s anti-apartheid protest spread throughout the United States. AKA chapter Kappa Omega conducted a prayer vigil to protest apartheid at the Richard Russell Federal Building in Atlanta in conjunction with the Women’s Divi- sion of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Pi AKA chapter at Fisk led anti-apartheid marches at both Tennessee State and Vanderbilt Universities. AKA’s demonstrations show the raised consciousness of members beyond benevolence and reform to direct action that put self-interest aside for the beneﬁt of a global black community. Alpha Kappa Alpha continued to reach beyond the borders of the United States through their African Village Development Program. Although various chapters had been involved in hunger relief efforts for Ethiopia, AKA realized that in con- junction with Africare, its efforts could bring direct relief to a number of African villages. In 1986, AKA national headquarters encouraged each graduate chapter to provide relief to an African village. Each graduate chapter was assigned to a village and was expected to contribute from $250 to $5,000 in order to supply women’s labor saving devices (such as grain mills), livestock, poultry, child nutrition, food trees, health care, ﬁrewood, and educational training. A number of chapters visited the villages they sponsored. Tau Omega Chapter helped plant gardens in the Sam N’ Jaay village and built a water well. In 1985, the Seta Nu Omega Chapter gathered school supplies for the Goree Island Primary School in Senegal, West Africa, and a member of the chapter went on a pilgrimage to Senegal to deliver the supplies on Christmas Eve. Africare reported in 1987 that 158 chapters participated in the program, representing four Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority regions: Mid Atlantic, North Atlantic, Western, and Southeastern.57 Alpha Kappa Alpha provides an example of long-term counterpublic work that penetrated the larger public sphere and at particular moments transformed so- cial relations (e.g., anti-lynching legislation, the Mississippi Health Project, the Non-Partisan Council on Public Affairs, and the Martin Luther King Holiday). AKA challenged (as did white women) women-of color club movements and other early feminists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in general, as well as the doctrines of public and private, through its cultural work at a time when all women faced great limitations. The sorority’s goals and political programs have changed and will mostly likely continue to change. While AKA member Norma Boyd led the sorority in the quest for the eradication of lynching at the beginning of the twentieth century, sorority chapters today are responding to social problems of their own times. Current undergraduate and graduate chapters name AIDS education, working with the Red Cross and battered women’s shelters, programswhaley: the counterpublic sphere work of alpha kappa alpha sororit y 157

geared toward increased literacy in the community, voter registration, and scholar-ships as important local chapter goals. AKA graduate chapters also work to carryout the yearly programs designated by national headquarters. National goals for1994–98 included implementing Mathematics and Science Literacy, funding SeniorResidence Centers, securing a presence in Washington, D.C., politics, and formingpartnerships with local and national Red Cross branches. The regional chaptersreported in 2000 that they accomplished the following work that year:

$40,000 collected for their membership-sponsored elementary school, the IVY

AKAdemy School, in the rural part of Swazi Zulu, near Durbin in South Africa; $125,000 given in scholarships for higher education from their Educational En- dowment Fund; Further nurture of their ONTRACK program, a youth program designed to pro- mote citizenship among African Americans, which has served 6,000 youth; $25,000 to the United Negro College Fund; $10,000 to the National Council of Negro Women; $10,000 to the National Urban League; $7,600 to a Dallas, Texas, organization that aids the children of battered women.

AKA’s Supreme Basileus called for a national voter registration and vote drive.In response, each chapter worked with black voter precincts in their respectivecommunities to register voters that live in the city and suburbs. The women alsoworked to register close friends and relatives, placed ﬂyers in churches and otherlocations where African Americans frequent to stress the importance of voting,and moved toward electing a president who shares the legislative values of thesorority.58

Although the work of AKA continues, its national agenda seems less radical inthe new millennium. In 2004, the Alpha Chapter of AKA participated in a hungerfast and raised $21,000 for AIDS and hunger relief for the Africare organization.In the words of former Alpha Chapter president Rashida Rogers, the womenwanted, through their fasting, “to empathize with those who suffer from HIV/AIDS, homelessness, and hunger.”59 The women’s donations to Africare and theireducational programs on AIDS and HIV awareness in partnership with the RedCross are commendable. However, in view of the rising number of black womenwho are contracting HIV in the United States,60 a localized health initiative likethe Mississippi Healthcare Project would generate great beneﬁts for today’s blackfemale citizens. The National Non-Partisan Council on Public Affairs has com-158 CONTOURS 3:2

mented on the status quo of exclusion for a variety of groups, such as farmers, the working poor, veterans, black men and women, women of color, and white women. Similar efforts today might change the face of American politics in the twenty-ﬁrst century. AKA women continue to work for mass voter registration, but further transformation could result from stronger efforts like those of the immediate postwar years and 1960s. For the most of the twentieth century, AKA sorority merged theory with praxis in their counterpublic works to bring about quantiﬁable change. Yet the women might use less conservative tactics in view of our current historical moment. Given the incarceration of large numbers of black women and men in the nation’s indus- trial prison complex, the sorority’s possible work with our prison population and other types of support for radical political countermovements seems urgent. No one social space can serve every social ill, but any group that professes to respond to the urgency of Africa America, such as AKA, might entertain newer, as well as older, programs. Such an approach would constitute what Manning Marable deﬁnes as immediate “non-reformist reform.”61 This type of reform relies on working within the present state and from localized sites to envision signiﬁcant change across the full spectrum of Africa America, including the working poor and sexual minorities, and against the hegemonic order, which keeps the nation’s masses subordinate. In the tradition of BPSC, this (re)formation would not only connect black intellectuals with the energies of the street, but it would also enact change originating from below (a grassroots working-class struggle) rather than from above (a middle-class uplift struggle). All of these prescriptions lead to the following rhetorical question: What and/or who does the politics of respectability that black sorority women continue to engage in and their carefully tailored service programs elide and hide, and what are the long-term social and political effects of this invisibility? AKA’s social aspects, as seen with its split in 1912, its intentions for reform, and its current activism are not without contradictions. This complicated nature of AKA sorority rearticulates “the social” and “the political” in profound ways. In the con- text of a black women’s organization in a racist and sexist society, “the social” and “the political” are almost impossible to disentangle. For AKA, its multiple origins affected how its members constituted their collective identity in educational, social, and political terms; it also affected how this consciousness facilitated transforma- tion and use of the space of a college sorority for black counterpublic sphere work and reform purposes. Analysis of their activism has been meant to show how the women created a theory of social justice and acted upon their consciousness for change through the sorority afﬁliation. Their chapters’ suffrage campaigns, Negro Teachers Program, healthcare interventions, anti-lynching legislation, political participation during World War II, 1960s and 1970s civil rights activism, 1980s anti-whaley: the counterpublic sphere work of alpha kappa alpha sororit y 159

programs, as well as their twenty-ﬁrst-century AIDS activism, all mark this workas more than typical forms of benevolence—or individual, random good deeds.AKA’s conservative components, commitment, and the breadth of the hands-onactivism across chapters of the organization provide a nuanced way of appreciatingthe possibilities of a black collegiate sorority. AKA’s black counterpublic spherework also draws attention to the ground upon which seeds of transformation mightgerminate in new times and with a renewed vision of change. Indeed, the abilityof AKA’s women to ﬁght on several political fronts injects both ambivalence andhope into their sorority motto: “By merit and by culture, we strive and we do, forthe gift without the giver is not true.”

NOTES

1. Artist Adelaide Johnson sculpted the Stanton, Mott, and Anthony monument. The three bustsof Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott were meshed together to honorthe Women’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exhibition in 1893. In accordance with HouseConcurrent Resolution 216, which Congress passed in September 1996, the sculpture was movedto the Capitol Rotunda in May 1997. 2. “A Black Group Assails Statue of Suffragists,” New York Times, March 9, 1997, p. 28. 3. The Black Public Sphere Collective, preface to The Black Public Sphere: A Public Culture Book(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 1–4. 4. For a discussion of class and color in black Greek-letter organizations, see Deborah ElizabethWhaley, “The Empty Space of African American Sorority Representation: Spike Lee’s School Daze,”in African American Fraternities and Sororities: The Legacy and the Vision, ed. Tamara Brown et al.(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005), pp. 417–36. 5. On African American sororal participation, see Marjorie Parker, Alpha Kappa Alpha through theYears, 1908–1988 (Chicago: The Mobium Press, 1990), and Paula Giddings, Delta Sigma Theta andthe Challenge of the Black Sorority Movement (New York: William and Morrow, 1988). For more onAKA healthcare reform, see Susan L. Smith, “Sharecroppers and Sorority Women: The Alpha KappaAlpha Mississippi Health Project,” in Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Black Women’s HealthActivism in America, 1890–1950 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 149–67.Smith mentions class divisions between AKA women and those they helped in healthcare reform. 6. George Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger (Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 2001), and Robin Kelly, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: BeaconPress 2002). As Kelly writes (p. ix): “Too often, our standards for evaluating social movementspivot around whether they succeeded in realizing their visions rather than on the merits or powerof the visions themselves. By such a measure, virtually every radical movement failed because thebasic power relations they sought to change [or question] remain pretty much intact. [Yet] it isprecisely these alternative visions and dreams that inspire new generations to continue to strugglefor change.” 7. For a cross-cultural comparison of African American, Jewish, Mormon, and Protestant women’sclubs and literary societies, see Anne Ruggles Gere, Intimate Practices: Literacy and Cultural Workin U.S. Women’s Clubs, 1880–1920 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997), pp.1–17, 134–70. 8. On Chicana women’s clubs, feminist organizations, and their roots within Mexican and Mexican160 CONTOURS 3:2

American benevolent groups, see Cynthia E. Orozco, “Beyond Machismo, La Familia, and Ladies Auxiliaries: A Historiography of Mexican-Origin Women’s Participation in Voluntary Associations and Politics in the United States, 1870–1990,” in Perspectives in Mexican American Studies: Mexican American Women Changing Images (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1995), pp. 1–34.; El- vira Valenzuela Crocker, In One Dream, Many Voices: A History of the Mexican American Women’s National Association (San Antonio, Tex.: Dagen Bela Raphics, Inc., 1991); Vicki L. Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (London: Oxford University Press, 1998). On Asian American women’s organizations, see Lisa Lowe, “Work, Immigration, Gender,” in Making More Waves: New Writing By Asian American Women, a project by Asian American Women United (Boston: Beacon Press 1997), pp. 269–77; Evelyn Nakano Glen, Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese Women in Domestic Service (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); Lucie Hirati, “Chinese Immigrant Women in Nineteenth-Century California,” in Women of America, ed. Carol R. Berkin and Mary B. Norton, (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin 1979), pp. 223–44; Mayumi Tsutakawa, “The Asian Women’s Movement: Superﬁcial Rebellion?” Asian Resources, available from Karl Lo, East Asia Library, Gowen Hall, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195; Nancy D. Donnely, Changing Lives of Refugee Hmong Women (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994); Karen Hossfeld, “Hiring Immigrant Women: Silicon Valley’s Simple Formula,” in Women of Color in U.S. Society, ed. Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thorton Dill, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), pp. 65–94; Marcia Williams, “Ladies on the Line: Punjabi Cannery Workers in Central California,” in Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by and about Asian American Women, ed. Asian American Women United of California (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), pp. 148–58. For more information about WARN, write to Women of All Red Nations, 870 Market St., Suite 438, San Francisco, CA 94102. See also Rayna Green, Signs 6 (Winter 1980): 248–67; Winona La Duke, “In Honor of Women Warriors,” Off Our Backs 11 (February 1981): 3–4. 9. Pricilla Murolo, “Quests for Respectability, Demands for Respect,” The Common Ground of Womanhood: Class, Gender, and Working Women’s Clubs, 1884–1928 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997), pp. 23–36. 10. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism,” Chandra Talpade Mohanty et al., Third World Women and the Politics of Struggle (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 28–47. 11. The Republican Mother ideology ﬂourished during 1776–1820 and held that the “model repub- lican woman be competent, conﬁdent, rational, benevolent, independent, and self-reliant [in order to be] better wives and better mothers for the next generation of virtuous republican citizens.” See Linda Kerber, “The Republican Mother,” in Women’s America: Refocusing The Past, ed. Linda Kerber and Jane Sherron De Hart, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 89–92. 12. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1993) outlines how African American women adopted the politics of respectability as a way to redeﬁne notions of black womanhood. White working-class women used this same moral strategy and resisted the notion that their class status could make them less womanly. As Pricilla Murolo writes, “their working class pride suffused women’s club members’ embrace of upper middle class standards of womanliness and sensibilities.” Murolo, Quests for Respectability, p. 25. 13. Stephanie Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Do and to Be: Black Professional Women Workers During the Jim Crow Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 15. 14. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1994), pp. 115–32. 15. Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), pp. 180–81. 16. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Collancz, 1963), pp. 8–13.whaley: the counterpublic sphere work of alpha kappa alpha sororit y 161

17. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, pp. 12–13.

18. White women’s clubs dwindled drastically in numbers after 1920 not only because they wonthe vote, but also because of the changing historical trends of increased industrialization andcapitalism. These factors changed the ethos and political focus of white women’s activism. SeeGere, Intimate Practices, pp. 248–69. 19. Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), p. 131. 20. “Stepping into Black Power: Black Fraternities and Sororities Give Their Members Access toa Network of Inﬂuence and Power-and Good Times, Too. So What’s Wrong with That?” RollingStone, March 23, 1988. 21. This history of AKA is culled from Marjorie Parker, Alpha Kappa Alpha through the Years,1908–1988 (Chicago: The Mobium Press, 1990); Norma Boyd, A Love that Equals My Labors (Chi-cago: Mobium Press, 1988); and James Willis Jackson and Anita K. Ritch, The Search for SomethingBetter: Ida Louise Jackson’s Life Story (Chicago: Mobium, 1989). 22. Giddings, Delta Sigma Theta, p. 19. 23. Parker, Alpha Kappa Alpha, p. 36. 24. Giddings, Delta Sigma Theta, p. 49. 25. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into BourgeoisSociety (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995). 26. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of ActuallyExisting Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Mass.:MIT Press, 1992), pp. 109–42. 27. See Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent; Houston Baker, “Critical Memory and the BlackPublic Sphere,” in The Black Public Sphere Collective, The Black Public Sphere (Chicago: Universityof Press of Chicago, 1995), pp. 7–37; Mary P. Ryan, “Gender and Public Access: Women’s Politics inNineteenth Century America,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 259–88; Ellen Messer-Davidow, “Manufacturing the Attack on LiberalHigher Education,” Social Text 36 (Fall 1993): 40–80. For a critical analysis of public sphere theorysee Michael Schudson, “Was There Ever a Public Sphere? If So, When? Reﬂections on the AmericanCase,” Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun, pp. 143–63. 28. The autobiography of member Ida Louise Jackson, who founded the AKA chapter at theUniversity of California, Berkeley, suggests that the chapter was formed to create a forum whereAfrican American women could act on their concerns about racism and their feelings of alienationon Berkeley’s campus. See James Willis Jackson and Anita K. Ritch, The Search for Something Better:Ida Louise Jackson’s Life Story (Chicago: Mobium, 1989). 29. I do not wish to discount the work of white sororities and white women’s clubs. I want tonote the intercultural work between black and white women’s clubs as described in Higginbo-tham, Righteous Discontent. However, I argue that the multiple identities of black women (race,gender, historically of a poor socioeconomic class, and descendant from slavery) and the adversepsychological and material effects of racism sharpened their focus on race work. 30. Parker, Alpha Kappa Alpha, p. 36. 31. Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1968),p. 233. 32. These articles include Alice McGhee’s essay, “A Soror in Japan,” Ivy Leaf 2 (March 1935): 11;Clayda Jane Williams, “Impressions: A First Trip Abroad,” Ivy Leaf 1 (November 1934): 10; MerzeTate, “Two Sorors at Oxford,” Ivy Leaf 1 (November 1934): 13. 33. Parker, Alpha Kappa Alpha, p. 163. 34. Ann Meis Knupfer, Toward a Tenderer Humanity and a Nobler Womanhood: African AmericanWomen’s Clubs in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (New York: New York University Press, 1997), pp.46–47. 35. “With the Editor: Jane Addams,” The Ivy Leaf 2 (March 1935): 42.162 CONTOURS 3:2